And what happens if the US Government decides that a "fairness" doctrine needs to be implemented on Talk Radio? Or that advertising on TV should be taxed? The government has all manner of means to influence and control. Just because it has some connection with the purse strings doesn't make it more or less likely.
In all my fifty years I have never seen a detection van. Are such things possible anyway? How can a van detect the passive reception of radio signals? The truth is its all done by a list of names on a big computer. If you are on that list and havent paid, they will come and find you.
you might have a point IF the BBC produced a higher general level of quality than commercial TV. But it doesn’t.
Yes it does.
Whether it’s purely commercial like most of the US, charity funded like our PBS, or tax funded like the BBC, 99% of what winds up on TV is crap. Because one way or the other they’re still pandering to the taste of the average person (even if it’s a minority subsection of the average person) and the average person is a bleeding idiot that needs to be told not to put their extension ladder in cow poo (actual warning label you can find on ladders in the hardware store). As long as the goal is to get an audience of average people the medium will continue to produce crap, and the path of funding only nuances the goal, it doesn’t change it.
Absolutely so. But there you have the nub of it. "As long as the goal is to get an audience of average people.." But the BBC doesn't have that goal. They never have had. Because it is not dependent on ratings for its income, the pressure to produce cheap tat is nowhere near as strong. That's not to say ratings are of no importance to the Beeb. If the ratings fall very low then people will start asking why we need a public televisual service! But even so, it is much easier for the BBC to experiment and try our new things, and yes...80%+ won't work. But at least they have been given a go. Do you think any Commercial channel would have ever commissioned something like "Monty Python" in the early seventies? Or adapt Rober Graves' book "I Claudius", widely considered to be impossible to film, in the late seventies? Or produce televised versions of the complete works of Shakespeare, four to six plays a year, over a decade? Now, none of those examples might float your boat personally, but our society and out culture is all the better for all of them.
Actually I think it’s the other way around. I think when it comes to characterization they got away with more 30 or 40 years ago. They can show a hell of a lot more skin today, but subject matters have tightened up. One of the deep cable channels had a program about 8 years ago where they brought the heads of entertainment for he big 3 in to discuss how TV works and how it’s changed. For one segment they did “elevator pitches” for popular well regarded 70s TV shows, they didn’t mention the show though everybody always figured out what it was, they just rattled off the 30 second version of the subject, like “sit-com in a front line war hospital”. All three guys said over and over they could never show these shows: MASH, All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son and a handful of other shows considered classics of TV today. In the modern PC world you can’t have a war sit-com, you can’t have a main character that’s a racist, you can’t have a main character that goes to the porn theater every episode.
Agreed, the world has worstened. Censorship of sex and bad language has slackened considerably, while censorship of political viewpoints has been tightened.
Incidentally, both "All in the Family" and "Sandford and Son" are US adaptions of BBC shows.
I never had a hard time following the BSG storyline. And I wouldn’t say it was all nay-saying, it was human flaws bouncing off of each other, but they were always trying to do the right thing, problem is not everybody really knew what it was. It was a classic example of nobody being a villain in their own story. From their perspective everybody was a hero doing what was necessary, it was up to the audience to decide who was wrong. And it should have been relentlessly dark, when your story STARTS with a massive multi-planetary genocide that reduces the human population to a non-genetically survivable number it’s going to be a dark story. The Cylons weren’t necessarily one step ahead, and certainly weren’t at the end, the big advantage the Cylons had was a defined goal, the humans spent most of the series confused and pathless, the Cylons knew from the start what they wanted to accomplish and how. People with a goal will always beat the aimless wanderers. Nobody was flagellated for thinking for themselves, they just got to face the consequences of not thinking it through to the end. There was a lot of consequences in the show, a lot of the show was built around what happens after the quick fix stops working.
There's nothing wrong with being dark. There's nothing wrong with exploring the failings of Human beings. What's wrong is when you ONLY do that. I don't like shows which basically rubbish Humanity. I accept we are a fallen sinful race, but I gravitate to the "flawed masterpiece" idea myself. This anti-Humanity idea is very blatant these days - its all derived from this neo-pagan Gaia nonsense. It gets its attraction from reversing the traditional good and bad - shows where vampires are the heroes and Humans are the savages. Where Indians are noble and peaceful and the cowboys are ruthless and greedy. There was a shocking amount of moral equivalence BS in BSG too. "Don't call us toasters - its racist and mean and unworthy" - moral lessons from the machines that just attempted to commit genocide on the Human Race. It was all very interesting and enlightening for a while, but there's only so much of that stuff a man can take.
You just pointed out more reasons the government shouldn’t be in charge. At least here they’d have to take those extra steps. I never said money was the only way of controlling, but money is the easiest partly because it allows the government to exercise control without ever being overt.
The vans used to detect the magnetic change of a picture tube, which is rather distinctive. Now I think they also look for the heat signatures of LCD and plasma screens, also again very distinctive.
No sorry, you can claim that but in reality BBC TV has just as high a percentage of crap as every other TV system on the planet. That’s the simple truth.
And yes the goal of the BBC is still to get an audience of the average person. If the average person doesn’t want to watch what’s on the BBC then they won’t get the license, they still need the average person to watch to make money. I just pointed out a bunch of great TV made for commercial television, so the answer to your questions is yes yes yes and yes. All methods of funding still result in the same thing: 99% dreck 1% not dreck. It’s easy to point to the good stuff and pretend it’s the norm, but that’s all pretend. The reality is it’s still mostly crap.
Yup, we’ve stolen some good TV ideas from the BBC. Specifically Norman Lear has stolen a lot of good TV ideas from the BBC, I wish they’d consulted him when they made Top Gear America, he could have Americanized it without making it suck.
I don’t think BSG rubbished humanity. There were plenty of moments that showed the characters doing good things, making huge sacrifices. The show HAD to be dark, when you start with a massive genocide there isn’t a whole lot of room for light. That was the problem of the original show, 70s broadcast TV wasn’t prepared for a show that logically progressed from where it started. 00s cable TV could handle it. I never saw the moral equivalencies some people complain about in the show. Yeah sure the toasters didn’t like being called toasters, but they still got called toasters, nobody but them ever said people shouldn’t do it. Meanwhile the toasters spent a lot of time trying to convince themselves they’d done the right thing, and mostly failing. That was one of the big plot elements of the show that most ignore, half the cylons realized they’d done the wrong thing for the wrong reasons.